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Photography Collection

Photography Collection

The Museum’s permanent collection offers a rich photographic heritage, both as an expressive medium and a documentary record. The collection’s 7,000 images include works by Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Stieglitz, and Ruth Bernhard among 850 other photographers, and a wealth of representative examples of different photographic styles, genres and techniques, from early 19th century daguerreotypes and albumen prints to pictorialism, cutting-edge documentary and photojournalism, and digitally constructed imagery. While the entire collection illustrates the complex and varied history of the medium, in terms of subject matter and genres, MOPA's collection is particularly strong in mid-twentieth century Soviet Russian photography, and social documentary photography and photojournalism.

MOPA's archive has been viewed in much broader terms than as a mere repository designed to protect and preserve historic work. All of the materials in its collection are regarded as important community assets, and adjuncts to its exhibition and educational programs, reflecting its curatorial tenet that, "although art objects are carefully preserved within the museum space, the collection as a whole is held by the public, representing who we are and what we value as a culture.”

*Please note that the images above represent a small sample of works from the permanent collection. Not all works are available for viewing due to space restrictions in the galleries. To see what is currently on view, please visit our current exhibitions page.